Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to a method and apparatus for controlling the delivery of remote applications and desktops to client computers.
Description of the Related Art
A traditional Desktop Windows Manager (DWM) provides compositing functions between multiple image buffers allocated to software applications on one side of the DWM and a composite image buffer on the other (display) side. In remote computing systems, the compositing function may be located at the client end of a network to leverage the compositing engine capabilities inherent to some client computers. In some graphical user interface (GUI) environments, visual tree descriptors that define window positions and z-order are provided by each node connected to a client. The client reconstructs a remote visual tree corresponding to a desktop composition and renders content in compliance with the remote visual tree. In conventional multi-media redirection (MMR) architectures, the location definition for individual windows of a hosted desktop or hosted application may be extracted from the composed desktop and keyed which allows the client to compose media content in the corresponding region within the client composition.
Rapid market adoption of Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and application publishing schemes has accelerated the diversity of architectures in which the desktop presented to a user at a client has become an assembly of hosted desktops, hosted applications and streaming media content generated by multiple servers. Each such server comprises a unique set of capabilities and performance attributes and all are coupled to the client by networks of varying bandwidth limitations and latency characteristics.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for efficiently managing transport and composition of media in general and image sequences in particular such that the impact of the distributed nature of content assembly has minimum effect on user experience.